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Some games allow you to play Japanese games with certain settings, others might be quite different. Just to be safe, here are screenshots under the "Regional and Language Options" in Control Panel that it should be set to:

Also--and this was the only example that I came across--ef - the first tale. required me to switch the timezone to JST (GMT/UTC +9), otherwise it wouldn't start.

Wow, this one is quite surprising. I've also never seen this before.

Anyway, thanks for the guide, KJ. Much appreciated.

But perhaps you should consider adding an Applocale quick guide for those of us who'd rather use that, too.

( I do realize not all games run well under Applocale, and I always have problems with Winrar while trying to mount and extract files that have Japanese characters in them - and yes, the only way to fix that is to change your Non-Unicode settings to Japanese. )

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Sometimes I look back and think to myself, "how the hell did I manage to screw this up?"

For good measure I'm going to add a bit here on how to use AGTH and Atlas to translate game text into english on the fly. I used the example of Prism Ark here from a PM I sent someone regarding how to use AGTH:

First you want to have your AGTH.exe file in a folder that is preferably near the Prism Ark.exe file. Now, make a shortcut for your prism ark exe file and right click it and select properties. Heres where it might get a little bit tricky. Under the shortcut tab you should find a line of text in a box with the word target to the left. That's the address your shortcut is pointing to. Click on it and go right to the beginning of that line. Now in Quotation marks, type out the address of your AGTH.exe file. You will also need an /h code to hook the text for Prism Ark due to it being offset between other bits of data, which I will include. Also, if you are using Atlas Translation Tool, your want it to copy to clipboard to make it easier, so that would mean entering the command /c.

Thus, for example, if you put the AGTH.EXE file in the program files section in a folder called AGTH and the Prism Ark folder in it's default location, your shortcut bar would now read:

Now, when you open up the AGTH program, you should see a bar along with the program and it should have an address and then say WideCharacterToMultiByte. When the text starts appearing in game, you are going to want to click the drop down option, and if the /h code was entered correctly you should see an option labelled USERHOOK B. Select that and the game will start hooking your text. Other drop down options give different threads of text, one of which is your items and Prism description and battle text.

Now, If you open up Atlas Translation Tool and select the quickatlas option you should get the icon in your quicklaunch bar, right click it and select Automatic Clipboard Translation. Because you chose to have AGTH automatically copy text to the clipboard, Atlas should be translating the text as it comes up in the game. It won't be a perfect translation, but it was enough to save me many times in games I would otherwise have no idea what I'm doing.

Now normally most games won't use a USERHOOK B and will only require textout A or something of that variety. Sometimes there are multiple text threads so you just have to find the on that works for you. Most games don't require an /h code either and merely require you to put in the /c portion to copy it to clipboard, which Atlas will then translate. This way you get portions of translated text as it comes up. In this case the shorcut line from the example would normally read.

Make sure you put in any /h codes before the /c as the commands will initialize in that order, and since /c is normally the last thing you would need to do, the game will crash on bootup as the code becomes scrambled.

Great information! That explanation of the practical use of the /h option of AGTH was very helpful, in fact.

Concerning AppLocale, I wonder... What exactly does AppLocale do? Does it attempt to simulate both Standards and formats and the Language for non-Unicode Programs, or just the second one, or is it something else? I'd like to be able to use AppLocale so that I don't need at least one of those two, because it seems like it could cause trouble to my overall system (for instance, I read at http://web.archive.org/web/200604262...e_setting.html that it could affect DOS applications).

I use applocale and it works. The one to choose from the droplist in the prog is the last one. Thats japanese. ^^
Applocale pretty much runs the program with everything japanese. Except for your keyboard. But it works. Some might say it slows down performance or that you can't trust it. I didn't experience anything bad with it so far.

I was wondering if there was a way to get Japanese local games running without having to install the language files, or a manual way to install them.

I put a game on my ipod for college but the college computers don't have east asian fonts installed, and the've disabled being able to install them or even installing new fonts to the "Fonts" folder in control panel.

Tried applocal but it didn't work either.

Is there a way i can extract the files manually from my C: Drive, put them on my ipod and install manually at my college computer?

Even if you manage to install it manually, you won't be able to play. The reason why you need to change the setting is to display the kanji's, without it you'll get crap ( unreadable runestone stuff ).

For good measure I'm going to add a bit here on how to use AGTH and Atlas to translate game text into english on the fly. I used the example of Prism Ark here from a PM I sent someone regarding how to use AGTH:

First you want to have your AGTH.exe file in a folder that is preferably near the Prism Ark.exe file. Now, make a shortcut for your prism ark exe file and right click it and select properties. Heres where it might get a little bit tricky. Under the shortcut tab you should find a line of text in a box with the word target to the left. That's the address your shortcut is pointing to. Click on it and go right to the beginning of that line. Now in Quotation marks, type out the address of your AGTH.exe file. You will also need an /h code to hook the text for Prism Ark due to it being offset between other bits of data, which I will include. Also, if you are using Atlas Translation Tool, your want it to copy to clipboard to make it easier, so that would mean entering the command /c.

Thus, for example, if you put the AGTH.EXE file in the program files section in a folder called AGTH and the Prism Ark folder in it's default location, your shortcut bar would now read:

Now, when you open up the AGTH program, you should see a bar along with the program and it should have an address and then say WideCharacterToMultiByte. When the text starts appearing in game, you are going to want to click the drop down option, and if the /h code was entered correctly you should see an option labelled USERHOOK B. Select that and the game will start hooking your text. Other drop down options give different threads of text, one of which is your items and Prism description and battle text.

Now, If you open up Atlas Translation Tool and select the quickatlas option you should get the icon in your quicklaunch bar, right click it and select Automatic Clipboard Translation. Because you chose to have AGTH automatically copy text to the clipboard, Atlas should be translating the text as it comes up in the game. It won't be a perfect translation, but it was enough to save me many times in games I would otherwise have no idea what I'm doing.

Now normally most games won't use a USERHOOK B and will only require textout A or something of that variety. Sometimes there are multiple text threads so you just have to find the on that works for you. Most games don't require an /h code either and merely require you to put in the /c portion to copy it to clipboard, which Atlas will then translate. This way you get portions of translated text as it comes up. In this case the shorcut line from the example would normally read.

Make sure you put in any /h codes before the /c as the commands will initialize in that order, and since /c is normally the last thing you would need to do, the game will crash on bootup as the code becomes scrambled.

Truely an awesome guide. Thanks alot.

Any ways i thought i would add this too . http://reversed.tistory.com/6 is another guide. Although i couldnt figure out what was going on, Still is a good guide for people who can figure it out .

I also had a question. I played around with AGTH for few hours, But still couldnt get the text hooker to work. I want to get the text from the game to the AGTH, so that i can copy the text and use google translator to translate it for me. However i havent been able to do it.

This is what i did . First created a short cut of the game, then do as you said .

I should mention that when you are linking a game to AGTH that you have to have the quotation marks surrounding both the address for AGTH and the games exe. That's four quotation marks altogether and any extra pieces of code go in the middle. Once that's done you will only start getting the appropriate text in the window once it appears and you click the drop down menu to select the appropriate thread. The thread won't appear if there is no relevant text on screen so it's pretty easy to find which is the right one. It's almost always TextOut A or one of the GetGlyphOutline A's or GetTextExtent Point A's.

For some special systems like Alicesoft's it's different. Alicesoft is like Square in that they don't use standard coding procedures for their engine the rather complex (for eroge's anyway) System 4.0 and thus the usual address' don't apply. AGTH's makers actually had to go out of their way to make a special subroutine just for their games so this shouldn't be a problem if you are using one of the newer versions of it. In general with the System 4.0 the appropriate selection is actually System40.

The first option that comes up is DrawTextExW, which is actually just the text in your window heading as it's been drawn by the video card on your screen. Move the window to see what I mean.

Simple solution. Load the game, get in game, use the drop down bar in AGTH and click through every thread that ends in anything but DrawTextExW until you find the right one.

lol maybe this isnt the place but i came across a program that let me draw the kanji/hiragana/etc and it would tell me what it all meant. does anyone know what im talkin about? if so what is it called (i lost it)